a fiber blog by jackie pawlowski

Knits in Action

Yesterday I, along with Eric, my 3 brothers and their friends, my uncle and his friends, went to the Patriots AFC Championship game in Foxborough. In total, we had a caravan of 8 cars.

The tailgating was awesome. We had food stations with slow-cooked pulled pork, ribs, chicken wings, chili…. but the pièce de résistance was deep-frying chickens, and then anything else we could put in the deep fryer – meats, cheese, PB pretzels, cookies. We all reverted to our inner 15 yo boy selves around the deep fryer.

(I don’t know who the weird guy in the background is, and yes, that’s a TV hooked up so we could watch the NFC Championship game.)

I don’t want to talk about the game, or what an absolute spanking it was. The overlooked story of this game was the wind chill, and the battle of gear vs weather. I came to the fight prepared:

These handknits were but a small portion of the wool. I had knee-high smartwool socks under a wonderfully soft and warm pair of Red Maple alpaca socks I got at Rhinebeck from Mel & Dave. I had full-body woolen long underwear, under another pair of long johns, jeans, 2 woolen sweaters, a down coat, a giant woolen scarf, lined woolen hat with earflaps, with my down-filled hood up and pulled snug. I had hand warmers and toe warmers stuffed in mitts and shearling lined boots.

Overkill you say?

The opponent was a sustained wind in 18 degree weather, for a windchill of 5 degrees F (That’s -8 / -15 C for the rest of the world.) Our seats were about 10 rows from the very top of the stadium, so I don’t know, we were probably 10 stories up in the air, with no shelter. In fact, what’s the opposite of shelter, because it felt like the stadium created a wind tunnel of brutality.

I stood in this for 4 hours straight. Almost comfortably. Almost. I still have all my fingers.

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Ha! Good for you and the woolie layering and great eats. Sounds like you had a wonderful time considering all. My husband took my sons to AFC game at Gillette the Sunday before. They were almost as high as you in the stands, but had warmer weather thank goodness.